Quotes by Poets - Page 438

I wanted to shut my mind, that my thoughts might closeon my own peace, I wanted to closethe peace of my love in my heartlike dew in a dark rose."From "Philip Speaks
Caryll Houselander
A tree's shade is worth more than the knowledge of truth, my sons, for a tree's shade is true while it lasts, and the knowledge of truth is false in its very truth. The leaves' greenness is worth more, for a right understanding, than a great thought, for the leaves, greenness is something you can show others, but you can never show them a great thought. We are born without knowing how to talk and we die without having known how to express ourselves. Our life runs its course between the silence of one who cannot speak and the silence of one who wasn't understood, and around it hovers — like a bee where there are no flowers — a useless, inscrutable destiny.
Fernando Pessoa
If only yesterday could be my tomorrow then today wouldn't even matter.
Carroll Bryant
Some lesson are learnt the hard way, but worthy.
Gift Gugu Mona
Nature is not tailored to man. It exists for itself.
John E. Smelcer
If any man wish to write in a clear style, let him be first clear in his thoughts; and if any would write in a noble style, let him first possess a noble soul.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
There are people who are very resourceful At being remorseful And who apparently feel that the best way to make friends Is to do something terrible and then make amends.
Ogden Nash
Already the ripening barberries are redAnd the old asters hardly breathe in their beds.The man who is not rich now as summer goesWill wait and wait and never be himself.The man who cannot quietly close his eyescertain that there is vision after vision inside,simply waiting for nighttimeto rise all around him in darkness-it's all over for him, he's like an old man.Nothing else will come; no more days will openand everything that does happen will cheat him.Even you, my God. And you are like a stonethat draws him daily deeper into the depths.
Rainer Maria Rilke
When you surround yourself with dramatic people, your life will be driven by drama instead of destiny.
Gift Gugu Mona
O for a Muse of fire, that would ascendThe brightest heaven of invention,A kingdom for a stage, princes to actAnd monarchs to behold the swelling scene!Then should the warlike Harry, like himself,Assume the port of Mars; and at his heels,Leash'd in like hounds, should famine, sword and fireCrouch for employment. But pardon, and gentles all,The flat unraised spirits that have daredOn this unworthy scaffold to bring forthSo great an object: can this cockpit holdThe vasty fields of France? or may we cramWithin this wooden O the very casquesThat did affright the air at Agincourt?O, pardon! since a crooked figure mayAttest in little place a million;And let us, ciphers to this great accompt,On your imaginary forces work.Suppose within the girdle of these wallsAre now confined two mighty monarchies,Whose high upreared and abutting frontsThe perilous narrow ocean parts asunder:Piece out our imperfections with your thoughts;Into a thousand parts divide on man,And make imaginary puissance;Think when we talk of horses, that you see themPrinting their proud hoofs i' the receiving earth;For 'tis your thoughts that now must deck our kings,Carry them here and there; jumping o'er times,Turning the accomplishment of many yearsInto an hour-glass: for the which supply,Admit me Chorus to this history;Who prologue-like your humble patience pray,Gently to hear, kindly to judge, our play.
William Shakespeare
No man was ever yet a great poet, without at the same time being a profound philosopher.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Always judge a man by the coloring of his heart and only his heart. Truth can be found in his record of actions, not intentions.
Suzy Kassem
There is no balking genius. Only death can silence it or hinder.
Ella Wheeler Wilcox
What sort of life have you ledthat you find yourself, an adult male of late middle age,about to weep among the avocados and citrus fruitsin a vast, overlit room next to a bosomy Cuban Grandmawith her sparkly, extravagent eyewear?It's good that your parents are no longer alive.
August Kleinzahler
Nothing can happen more beautiful than death.
Walt Whitman
Every day the world subtracts from itself and nothingis immune.
Luanne Castle
A tree house, to me, is the most royal palace in the world
Munia Khan
I want you to know, if you ever read this, there was a time when I would rather have had you by my side than any one of these words; I would rather have had you by my side than all the blue in the world.But now you are talking as if love were a consolation. Simone Weil warned otherwise. 'Love is not consolation,' she wrote. 'It is light.'All right then, let me try to rephrase. When I was alive, I aimed to be a student not of longing but of light.
Maggie Nelson
Only those who have the great capacity of genuine trust can enter this realm [the realm of the buddhas]. Those who have no trust are unable to accept it, however much they hear it.
Dōgen
...And nostalgia is a cancer. Nostalgia will fill your heart up with tumors. Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's what you are. You're just an old fart dying of terminal nostalgia.
Sherman Alexie
Do ye hear the children weeping O my brothers?
E. B. Browning
A schoolboy's tale the wonder of an hour.
Lord Byron
So I guess you were hopelessly romantic and easily distracted, a B-plus mother, certainly good enough to get into Matriarchal State University but not quite good enough for St. Mary's College of the Blessed Womb Warriors.
Sherman Alexie
There is none In all this cold and hollow world no fount Of deep strong deathless love save that within A mother's heart.
Felicia D. Hemans
Oh love will make a dog howl in rhyme.
John Fletcher
I wish I loved the human Race, I wish I loved its silly face, and when I'm introduced to one, I wish I thought "what jolly fun"!
Walter Alexander Raleigh
Trust not yourself; but your defects to know,Make use of ev'ry friend—and ev'ry foe.
Alexander Pope
You can perhaps, in a number of circumstances, tell yourself that you can't have more than you have until you do better than you're doing, but by all means steer clear of its reverse, the creed of defeat, in saying that you can't do better than you're doing until you can have more than you have.
Criss Jami
Whiteness of moonlight builds a house that is not there
Kathleen Raine
Dare to love yourselfas if you were a rainbowwith gold at both ends.
Aberjhani
I have always imagined that Paradise will be a kind of library.
Jorge Luis Borges
When has life listened to anyone?It goes on at its own pace...Limping, when we wish it should run,And when calm desired, sprinting as in a race…
Neelam Saxena Chandra
When my desiregrows too fierceI wear my bed clothesinside out,dark as the night’s rough husk.
Ono no Komachi
Strike when thou wilt the hour of rest but let my last days be my best.
Robert Browning
Good morning, daddy!Ain't you heardThe boogie-woogie rumbleOf a dream deferred?Listen closely:You'll hear their feetBeating out and beating out a -You thinkIt's a happy beat?Listen to it closely:Ain't you heardsomething underneathlike a -What did I say?Sure,I'm happy!Take it away!Dream BoogieHey, pop!Re-bop!Mop!Y-e-a-h!
Langston Hughes
We first become salesmen as children in the confession booths of our parents.
Criss Jami
Each night I am nailed into placeand forget who I am.Daddy? That's another kind of prison.It's not the prince at all, but my fatherdrunkeningly bends over my bed, circling the abyss like a shark, my father thick upon melike some sleeping jellyfish.What voyage is this, little girl? This coming out of prison? God help -this life after death?
Anne Sexton
I love you not only for what you are, but for what I am when I am with you
Elizabeth Barrett-Browning
I thought my heart was pure. We do like to have such good opinions of our own motives when we're about to do something harmful, to someone else.
Margaret Atwood
Such stuff the world is made of.
William Cowper
Yes, my consuming desire is to mingle with road crews, sailors and soldiers, barroom regulars—to be a part of a scene, anonymous, listening, recording—all this is spoiled by the fact that I am a girl, a female always supposedly in danger of assault and battery. My consuming interest in men and their lives is often misconstrued as a desire to seduce them, or as an invitation to intimacy. Yes, God, I want to talk to everybody as deeply as I can. I want to be able to sleep in an open field, to travel west, to walk freely at night...
Sylvia Plath
Light tomorrow with today.
Elizabeth Barrett-Browning
If you know nothing be pleased to know nothing.
John Newlove
One honest John Tompkins, a hedger & ditcher, Although he was poor, did not want to be richer;For all such vain wishes in him were preventedBy a fortunate habit of being contented.
Jane Taylor
My music teacher offered twittering madrigals and something about how, in Italy, in Italy, the oranges hang on the tree. He treated me - the humiliation of it - as a soprano.These, by contrast, are the six elements of a Sacred Harp alto: rage, darkness, motherhood, earth, malice, and sex. Once you feel it, you can always do it. You know where to go for it, though it will cost you.
Mary Rose O'Reilley
There was an enjoyment to being alive, he felt, that because of an underlying meaninglessness–like how a person alone for too long cannot feel comfortable when with others; cannot neglect that underlying the feeling of belongingness is the certainty, really, of loneliness, and nothingness, and so experiences life in that hurried, worthless way one experiences a mistake–he could no longer get at.
Tao Lin
To love is easy, to be in a relationship is extremely difficult.
Santosh Kalwar
They tell us the greatest love story is how water fell in love with fire. Or how satan fell in love with God. But the greatest love story to me is how I didn’t notice myself falling, when I fell in love with you
Kamand Kojouri
He utters empty words he utters sound without mind.
Virgil
If you would know what the Lord God thinks of money you have only to look at those to whom he gives it.
Maurice Baring
Onwetend van dit alles maakte ik eind vorige eeuw mijn entree in dit discours door aan een tijdschrift te vertellen dat poëzie volgens mij entertainment is. Als iemand dat platvloers vindt, voegde ik er behulpzaam aan toe, had hij volgens mij een te lage dunk van entertainment.
Ingmar Heytze
There is no such thing as death In nature nothing dies: From each sad moment of decay Some forms of life arise.
Charles Mackay
I have no use for these other loves.Seal them shut in jarsand place them in the pantry. A reserve of love.Thank them for their love.They are so kind.Perhaps store them in the fridgeFor others to take.They say love is a panacea. I know it is not.Flakes of snow,no two are alike.When I am down on my knees, hopeless and angry,for the world no longer makes sense,I won't look in the pantry or fridge.It is your hand pressing on my shoulderthat makes me whole,makes me forget.What trouble? What world?
Kamand Kojouri
It is enough to write a few lines about tanks in the streets in some sad country, about a clear injustice, which requires no description; it is enough to move from one side to another, to satisfy someone’s taste, the need of the moment, the need for “big” games to take a peek into everything and to prove everything with cheap opinions formed almost on command, almost as a recipe of measured pain to resolve the crisis, to extinguish the pain based on a few words that don’t change anything except that they flatter vanity and a misguided interest in all dimensions of life and creation, in the air that is being poisoned by smoke from cars, smoke from the television screens, the smoke curtains of politicians, left and right, the smoke of films and pop culture, smokescreens of intelligence that finds an explanation for all this, makes up theories, finds justification for the schizophrenic decisions of the new rulers, for wars, agreements, contracts; finds justification for obedience, for the sale of beliefs under the disguise of conviction, for several awards, for a few moments of illusion in the hocus-pocus world where the truth does not interest anyone anymore, except for ways for lies to be packaged and sold as the greatest truth with the help of big intellectuals that will find a good argument, a good defense and justification for everything, since everything becomes much easier, if a hoax is supported by “scientific” evidence.
Dejan Stojanovic
I rose from marsh mudalgae, equisetum, willows,sweet green, noisybirds and frogs.
Lorine Niedecker
. . . We love fog becauseit shifts old anomalies into the elementssurrounding them. It gives relief from a way of seeing
Eavan Boland
Now say, have women worth, or have they none? Or had they some, but with our Queen is’t gone? Nay Masculines, you have thus tax’d us long, But she, though dead, will vindicate our wrong. Let such as say our sex is void of reason Know ‘tis a slander now, but once was tre
Anne Bradstreet
Souls are flowers, only God has the right to pluck them. But those who commit suicide: their souls are the rotten blossoms of devil's garden.
Munia Khan
Life needs a constant change, minds needs the constant change, only thing that is permanent in the world is change.
Santosh Kalwar
Find much to be grateful for in every day. Doing so will not only enrich your life, it will bless those around you in ways you may never know.
Richelle E. Goodrich